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Linked List: March 7, 2008

Friday, 7 March 2008

$.99 or $1.99 is indeed low, but I think Jens Alfke may have a point. It’s not that bigger, serious apps will sell for prices that low, but smaller, simpler apps that might otherwise have been released for free might generate real money with “cup of coffee”-level prices. It’s the App Store that makes this possible.

Can’t Help Falling in Love ★

John Siracusa:

Skilled Mac developers are uniquely positioned to be the first to market with the iPhone applications they’ve been designing in their heads since last year. They know the tools, they know the technology, they even know a lot of the APIs already, and those they don’t know look a lot like the ones they do.

Which Apps Run in the Background? ★

Tom Krazit:

The SDK item drawing the most attention Friday, however, is that third-party applications will not be allowed to run in the background.

To be fair, I don’t think many of Apple’s first-party apps run in the background, either. The Phone, SMS, Clock, iPod, and Mail apps do. Or at least they have helper app background tasks that do. But the other ones all seem to quit when you go to the home screen — you don’t really notice because they launch fast, quit fast, and save automatically.

Authentic Jobs ★

My thanks to Authentic Jobs for sponsoring the DF RSS feed this week. Authentic Jobs is a targeted job board for standards-aware web designers. (And, coming from Cameron Moll, Authentic Jobs is, unsurprisingly, itself a splendidly well-designed web site.) If you’re a web designer looking for full-time or freelance work, there are listings from a slew of great companies. If you’re a company looking to hire crackerjack web nerds, use promotion code DARINGFIREBALL and receive 50% off the listing price through March 10.

Apple Plans for Custom Enterprise App Distribution ★

So said Phil Schiller yesterday.

KPCB – iFund Initiative ★

Kleiner Perkins’s info page for the $100 million iFund.

‘The Other Direction’ ★

Great quote from Steve Jobs at the very end of the press Q&A today, after being asked whether phone carriers like AT&T will get a share of the revenue from the App Store:

“We’re not going to get into details, but generally we like to see the revenue flow the other direction.”

iPhone Human Interface Guidelines ★

You’ll need a (free) ADC account to access it, but part of today’s bonanza of iPhone SDK-related documentation is the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines. (Not to be confused with the previous “shit sandwich” version here.) I haven’t had time to do much more than skim, but it seems very well thought-out and organized. A snippet:

Only one iPhone application can run at a time, and third-party applications never run in the background. This means that when users switch to another application, answer the phone, or check their email, the application they were using quits. It’s important to make sure that users do not experience any negative effects because of this reality. In other words, users should not feel that leaving your iPhone application and returning to it later is any more difficult than switching among applications on a computer.

Update: Also worth noting is that the HIG’s name for the OS is “iPhone OS”. Seems wrong to use “iPhone” in the name, considering it runs on the iPod Touch, too. I’d have gone with “Mobile OS X” or “OS X Touch”.